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Just my 2 cents or so-
The lenient inputs and the more easier links reminds me of Garou somewhat. In Garou, you could do a QCF motion, then do the 2nd QCF, Hold forward for a split second then press Punch or Kick and your super could come out.
Far as links go, it's more visual feedback for me, but I couldn't land a link in SF4, for example, consistently, but would get more success in linking stuff in Garou for example (looking at you Grant)

The comment about defensive options is interesting, one thing that I recall SF4 being critiqued for is that it felt too 'defensive'.

As a final note- HOLY CRAP ACTUAL FOOTAGE OF CAMMY BEATING A HONDA IN ST.

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Man that's the one I hate the most about street fighter 5 now that it's more "accessible"

The loss of player expression ... amazing executing players like Sako , Smug , countless others are straight up neutered in this game. You seen one top Karin ... you seen them all, you see one Mika, Rashid, Balrog , Bison, Dhalsim. Yes they still win but the style is most definitely gone completely from SFV.

Making Street Fighter more accessible is good for everyone, in my opinion. Experts aren't really affected, but new players can get past the awkward beginner phase faster and into the intermediate phase where the interesting strategy starts to emerge.

There are some players who wrongly believe that this "dumbs the game down." Actually, the opposite is true. Experts can perform special moves already, so the changes toward easier execution of moves have very little effect on them. Experts will care about actual balance changes such as hitboxes, recovery times, new properties for some moves, and so on. Making special moves easier, however, just allows everyone else to play the "real" game without needing to develop hundreds of hours of muscle memory just to perform the moves. It's actually sad to hear that some players think that their ability to execute a 360 command throw is why they are good, as opposed to the actual strategy of getting close enough to the opponent with Zangief to land the throw.

Another wrong-headed comment I often get is that easier controls don't leave enough skills in the game to separate good and bad players. The statement is absurd. Easier special moves don't change the strategic depth of the game at all (and the actual balance changes in HD Remix increase the strategic depth). Furthermore, there's no shortage of nuance for experts. Does Cammy's dragon punch beat Fei Longs? It depends on exactly who did it first, which means that 1/60th of a second timing is just as important as ever. So is positioning, spacing, the difficulty of performing combos, and the skill of reading the mind of the opponent.

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Reduction in skill gap and reduction in skill floor are two different things that I hope people don't conflate.

It's good to lower the skill floor because it allows more people to hop into the game but lowering skill gap is bad for the competitive lifespan of a game. You always want the better player to win when it comes to competitive games especially fighting games.

Other games like KOF,Tekken and GG got more beginner/intermediate player friendly installments too,yet they havent received as much flak as SFV.

I see the same criticism when comparing KOFXIV to 98UM. First is supposed to be more mash friendly.

Because reduction in skill floor isn't the same as reduction in skill gap.

They made those games easier to get into... but Tekken is still Tekken. You are still going to get roasted if you don't know what you are doing and there's no extraneous factors to help you.

SFV lowers skill gap by implementing additional input lag, significant comeback potential and rewarding of explosive game play strategies. It's stuff like increased grey life build up, removal of defensive option selects, weak anti airs, weak poke normals, slow walk speeds + fast dash speeds, smaller hitboxes/hurt boxes on normals that leads to this style of game play that ultimately lowers the skill gap. Other games don't have it like this especially not GG or Tekken.

An example of lowering the skill floor is the implementation of the input frame buffer. This makes combo execution easier but it doesn't make combos in general easy because stuff like Tekken still has input buffers but has hard combos still. SFV has easy combos because the combos are just very basic and vanilla, it's still possible to make hard combos even with a generous buffer system. Example of lowering the skill gap is the introduction of input lag to simulate offline play which inherently rewards predictive play over reactive play.

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Really enjoyed it, though my one criticism is that he brings up the dichotomy of high skill / high luck games and high skill / low luck games, but doesn't really make further commentary on them, instead focusing on the comparison between high skill / low luck and low skill / high luck.

Yeah it's had the opposite effect for me. Like they alluded to in the video, you generally watch for the spectacle and to appreciate good ability. You also want to see all playstyle archetypes given a chance to thrive at the same time.

I think that ideal is blurred in V, which for me means, even though it does have its moments, I do find myself tuning out after a while. I found SF4 gripping from a spectator point of view.

I miss the time when people with same character play it completely different. Nuckledu's Guile wasn't the same as Dieminion's. Same goes to Justin and Ricky (Rufus), Bonchan and Ryan Hart (Sagat) or PoongKo and Dashio (Seth) to say a few examples.

So even from an spectator point of view SFV it's more boring cause you're seeing most of the players approaching a character the same way...

Member

Man that's the one I hate the most about street fighter 5 now that it's more "accessible"

The loss of player expression ... amazing executing players like Sako , Smug , countless others are straight up neutered in this game. You seen one top Karin ... you seen them all, you see one Mika, Rashid, Balrog , Bison, Dhalsim. Yes they still win but the style is most definitely gone completely from SFV.

I miss the time when people with same character play it completely different. Nuckledu's Guile wasn't the same as Dieminion's. Same goes to Justin and Ricky (Rufus), Bonchan and Ryan Hart (Sagat) or PoongKo and Dashio (Seth) to say a few examples.

So even from an spectator point of view SFV it's more boring cause you're seeing most of the players approaching a character the same way...

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I miss the time when people with same character play it completely different. Nuckledu's Guile wasn't the same as Dieminion's. Same goes to Justin and Ricky (Rufus), Bonchan and Ryan Hart (Sagat) or PoongKo and Dashio (Seth) to say a few examples.

So even from an spectator point of view SFV it's more boring cause you're seeing most of the players approaching a character the same way...

Do you watch SFV matches? Momochi's Ken looks nothing like Eita's. Nuckledu's Guile looks nothing like Daigo's. MenaRD's Birdie looks nothing like XYZZY's. I could go on and on.

As for the video:
Anyway, I think people are complaining just because they don't like SFV personally. Was SonicFox winning pretty much every single MKX tournament last year really more exciting than Bonchan winning a CPT premier with Nash? I dunno.

It definitely isn't more fun to watch for me but i think the idea is to make it more fun to watch to people that don't know much about the game.
For people who know a lot about fighting games there is nothing special about seeing balrog do a crapton of damage from a low across the screen into a very easy combo or watching the same rock paper scissors situation with the same limited options over and over again.

As for the video:
Anyway, I think people are complaining just because they don't like SFV personally. Was SonicFox winning pretty much every single MKX tournament last year really more exciting than Bonchan winning a CPT premier with Nash? I dunno.

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While in general I would agree with making the games more accessible, there's something to be said about the more tactile feel of fighting games with more demanding input requirements. In a weird way, playing something like Hokuto no Ken or Fate/Unlimited Codes feels good just because of how demanding the execution is in those games, and it's something that modern FGs don't have anymore (for better or for worse... probably better, in balance).

That and in at least some instances, execution requirements change the strategic possibilities. You can really see this in the 3DS version of SF4, where the touch inputs make charge characters absurdly good and ticks into 720 are now doable from anything. Those moves are designed with their execution limitations in mind, and removing those barriers actually limits the design space somewhat.

Execution should matter, but as we can see even with the "easy" SF5 combos things get dropped left and right. Honestly, it probably was the right call to lower the skill floor as they did (it's just the 1,000 other things they got wrong in SF5)

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I got into gaming because SF2 and I've been playing fighting games since then. This is not to say I get to dictate what's okay or not - but I firmly believe more lenient inputs are a good thing, and I'm definitely not a newcomer or someone who generally struggles in the genre. SFV's issues with balance and input lag are an entirely different thing, but yeah, you won't make me agree that inputs need to be hard just because.

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Do you watch SFV matches? Momochi's Ken looks nothing like Eita's. Nuckledu's Guile looks nothing like Daigo's. MenaRD's Birdie looks nothing like XYZZY's. I could go on and on.

As for the video:
Anyway, I think people are complaining just because they don't like SFV personally. Was SonicFox winning pretty much every single MKX tournament last year really more exciting than Bonchan winning a CPT premier with Nash? I dunno.

Sure, they're pulling from the same obvious toolbox, but the different ways of expressing themselves are still there somewhat. It's just more about the contexts/situations at times, which I think, actually DOES lead to more unique moments.

Still an excellent and valid video tho, for sure and that SFV Ryu parry is, indeed, hilarious

Menard and xyzzy are completely different though. It's almost eita vs momochi different. Xyzzy is far more defensive while menard is more yolo offensive. It's why xyzzy sucks in s2 and menard got a lot better. They nerfed the tools that xyzzy used in s1 and gave menard more offensive things to play with.

And I'm not sure if I'm proving his point. Variance is better for a game than people want to give credit for. If you want more money in esports, you want it to be more like poker and less like chess. People respect chess, but poker makes people feel emotionally engaged. This is as someone who was my school chess champion and someone who played poker for a living.

Anyways I agree that it's important not to conflate reducing the skill gap and lowering the barrier to entry. Ideally you want a skill curve that increases exponentially, with the most demanding of dexterity and execution requirements only mattering at the top.

There's also perceived barrier to entry, something that matters a lot to the greater audience and is part of marketing.

Member

Reduction in skill gap and reduction in skill floor are two different things that I hope people don't conflate.

It's good to lower the skill floor because it allows more people to hop into the game but lowering skill gap is bad for the competitive lifespan of a game. You always want the better player to win when it comes to competitive games especially fighting games.

Because reduction in skill floor isn't the same as reduction in skill gap.

They made those games easier to get into... but Tekken is still Tekken. You are still going to get roasted if you don't know what you are doing and there's no extraneous factors to help you.

SFV lowers skill gap by implementing additional input lag, significant comeback potential and rewarding of explosive game play strategies. It's stuff like increased grey life build up, removal of defensive option selects, weak anti airs, weak poke normals, slow walk speeds + fast dash speeds, smaller hitboxes/hurt boxes on normals that leads to this style of game play that ultimately lowers the skill gap. Other games don't have it like this especially not GG or Tekken.

An example of lowering the skill floor is the implementation of the input frame buffer. This makes combo execution easier but it doesn't make combos in general easy because stuff like Tekken still has input buffers but has hard combos still. SFV has easy combos because the combos are just very basic and vanilla, it's still possible to make hard combos even with a generous buffer system. Example of lowering the skill gap is the introduction of input lag to simulate offline play which inherently rewards predictive play over reactive play.

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It's not just SFV that does it. Smash and NRS all do this that closing in the gap between casuals and "pros". In my opinion, I think it's a good thing that people can execute moves better without silly arbitrary nonsense that you will never learn due to it being too time consuming but I believe there can be a balance/option between the two. Anyway, execution is only a very small part of a fighting game player, it's how they use the character, thier play style, strategy and mentality in the game that matters.

Member

Watched the video, and while I understand it I profoundly dislike this attitude that the audience who puts hundreds of hours into a game take precedent over the ones who dont.

Theit is this weird superiority I see in these sort of videos that the hardest of core audiences clearly know what's best for the franchise and that it should cater to them exclusively. A similar argument came up when DmC controls were announced (I'm talking ONLY about control inputs) that allowed for easier comboing.

Yes these vids are impressive but I don't think they should come at the cost of alienating huge swaths of people who like to buy their numbered street fighters when they come out then put them back on the shelf when they are done. In the case of the DMC franchise there were some very cool mechanics that you couldn't even start to explore because inputs were so difficult. Erasing this arbitrary barrier of odd inputs allowed you to actually start exploring systems like cancels, air hops, combo creation which are the far more interesting and rewarding aspects than just practicing back forwards for hours.

There is this weird reaction going through the gaming community that games are dumbing down to reach a broader audience when I think that deva are just trying to get more people to see and use systems they build that used to only available to a very small percentage of people.

I think these hard core gamers can point out when things are just wrong or could be improved, but not turn it so far in their direction by setting up barriers. I think the best example of this sort of 'open up the game while also respecting the knowledge of the fan base' was DmC Definitive Edition. DmC Definitive kept the simple control scheme BUT they took the frame information, timing, speed feedback from the hard core audience and created, in my opinion, one the best action combat systems ever due to its instant accessibility to start exploring with the similar speed and moveset from previous titles.

They nerfed DPs HEAVILY in season 2 to the point where almost no one uses DPs anymore, heck pro players don't even risk using DPs to AA sometimes because their jump in might be deep enough to hit them out of it. The reward for landing a DP is still the same but the loss of having a bad DP can be 40-60% of your life bar, stun and corner carry depending on the situation.

They nerfed V-Reversals, the one consistent way for everyone to escape pressure. They're now garbage for most characters and for most situations.

The game essentially revolves way too heavily around comebacks and mixups to the point where they don't matter. Too many times we've seen Balrog land one overhead into V-Trigger and win the match off of that damage and the almost unreactable mixup that follows. Too many times we've seen Ibuki lose the match, get V-Trigger, land a hit and then create 50/50 mixups which leads to her winning the match. Same for Laura. Same for Ken.

The neutral situation is literally just "whoever hits long range CC button, wins" and "whoever gets the jumpin, wins". In both those situations, you're still safe if the attempt gets blocked so just reset and try again.

There's more points as well but I'm feeling tired because of Ramadan and I hope somebody else can continue the list.

Thank you for this. Perfectly summarises what I think about execution in a fighting game. It's not that I don't want players to feel like they are "good" with awful 1-frame links but I just want them to get to the real meat of game - which is the play style, strategy and reads from the players.

Member

Do you watch SFV matches? Momochi's Ken looks nothing like Eita's. Nuckledu's Guile looks nothing like Daigo's. MenaRD's Birdie looks nothing like XYZZY's. I could go on and on.

As for the video:
Anyway, I think people are complaining just because they don't like SFV personally. Was SonicFox winning pretty much every single MKX tournament last year really more exciting than Bonchan winning a CPT premier with Nash? I dunno.

While I agree that SFV reduces player expression compared to SFIV, simply due to the less flexible system, you have to keep in mind that SFIV was a 7 year old game when SFV was released. Go back and look at first year / second year SFIV tournament matches and then compare that to what it became during Ultra.

Junior Member

In terms of player expression, I'm not sure if removing the 3-frame buffer is the right idea. Not only would it scare some people off, but it'd also impact online play since it'd make certain combos impossible online (see SFIV). I believe the answer lies in expanding the V-System & allowing for more defensive options (including buffing the range of normals), though the former can assist with the latter.

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but this is actually pro players, a ridiculously small minority, being sad that they are not being the focus of a game.

booo hooo

If you focus on just the evo people you will not sell enough to make street fighter 6. IF anything they might manage to get the money more from tournament sponsors than actual pro player sales.

There are way more people who spectate (as in watching evo) and there are WAY more people who paid for Injustice and less competitive Smash games.

Expanding your audience is awesome and franchises evolves with time.

Skill floor, skill gap... whatever. The problem is what Capcom is doing is trying to send everyone into the esports. You either focus on Diego or you focus on selling the game to a larger audience. I would have voted on selling the game to a larger audience, this video clearly wants them to sell shitty and focus on the pros, which was EXACTLY what killed the genre on the first time

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I dislike most of fight games because of lack of accessibility.This is the very reason why i dislike Mortal Kombat 10, because controls ar emuch less lenient than in previous games. I dislike pro fighting scene because i feel they make life harder for me and lot of people who would just want to have fun with fight games.

Junior Member

but this is actually pro players, a ridiculously small minority, being sad that they are not being the focus of a game.

booo hooo

If you focus on just the evo people you will not sell enough to make street fighter 6. IF anything they might manage to get the money more from tournament sponsors than actual pro player sales.

There are way more people who spectate (as in watching evo) and there are WAY more people who paid for Injustice and less competitive Smash games.

Expanding your audience is awesome and franchises evolves with time.

Skill floor, skill gap... whatever. The problem is what Capcom is doing is trying to send everyone into the esports. You either focus on Diego or you focus on selling the game to a larger audience. I would have voted on selling the game to a larger audience, this video clearly wants them to sell shitty and focus on the pros, which was EXACTLY what killed the genre on the first time

I dislike most of fight games because of lack of accessibility.This is the very reason why i dislike Mortal Kombat 10, because controls ar emuch less lenient than in previous games. I dislike pro fighting scene because i feel they make life harder for me and lot of people who would just want to have fun with fight games.

Are you shitposting?
Your main point has nothing to do with the video. The video is about the competitive aspect of the game being stale because of easy execution, so no wonder it'll talk about pros and their opinions.

The lack of sales compared to Injustice or Smash has nothing to do with execution or lack thereof. It has to do with production values, fanservice, and content, all things that the game lacked in at launch and in some ways still does today. Injustice is a harder game to play than SFV, both at an entry level and at a high level, but it still sells a lot more because of the love put into it wrt content and things to do.

Tekken's always been a global juggernaut in terms of sales and is a widely considered a hard game.

The problem is what Capcom is doing is trying to send everyone into the esports. You either focus on Diego or you focus on selling the game to a larger audience. I would have voted on selling the game to a larger audience, this video clearly wants them to sell shitty and focus on the pros, which was EXACTLY what killed the genre on the first time

You either didn't watch the video or didn't understand it. It talks about the game's skill floor/ceiling and execution, in which the game already caters to the casual crowd. And the game is still a sales disaster, so no, implementing what the video states wouldn't change the sales one bit, but would make the game more interesting to play and watch. Think about what you just wrote - Capcom made the game to cater to pros so it's selling shitty, but if what's asked in the video is implemented, it will cater to the pros and sell shitty. Do you see the disconnect? Either it doesn't currently cater to the pros (hence the video), or it does. You can't state both opinions and shit on the video.

The truth is they took wrong approaches to both aspects of the game - the fighting and the content. Content should always cater to the casuals, fighting should almost always cater to the pros. Instead, they focused the fighting on the casuals and the content on the pros, burning both groups and fucking themselves in both holes. The game will sell more if it's a better product for your $60 (or was at launch), but that's not what the video is about, and to be honest, isn't really a hot take anymore since it's been stated so much since launch.